The Wrong Voice
by ncfan
Summary: She hadn't cried since Yahiko died.


I own nothing.

* * *

She hasn't cried since she watched the life go out of Yahiko in the mud and rain. Konan spends most of her days wanting to, missing him and his touch and smile, filled to the brim with guilt and the knowledge that he'd died because of her and memories, so many memories, setting fire to her veins and making her fingers tremble so badly that she can't even perform jutsu for the first week and a half.

Nagato refuses to let her bury the body. He's lying on the ground in a hovel outside of Amegakure, his ruined legs twisted beneath him, his newly gaunt, emaciated body so frail that Konan is amazed that he hadn't died on the battlefield with Yahiko (_Though she's relieved that he hadn't, guiltily; he's in horrible shape, and in some ways probably would have been better off dead, but if he had died, she would have been left completely alone)_.

His wrists are so tiny, she notes numbly, so small that she could probably break them in the grasp of her delicate hands (_Yahiko had remarked upon her 'dainty hands' more than once, saying that it was no wonder she was so good with origami when she had such deft, slender fingers_). He lies wrapped in a bedroll, staring up at the ceiling all day. Konan doesn't know what to do with him and his broken body, nor his broken mind. All she can do is spoon-feed him thin broth (_'Please, give me some food. My brother, he's very ill'_—and she feels a bitterness rise in her mouth that she, once one of the leaders of the organization that was on its way to winning Ame's civil war, is now reduced back to begging for her bread as she'd done as a child, and still unwilling to steal) and keep watch over him at night, afraid to sleep for fear that he'll be dead when she wakes.

But he does not die.

Konan can hardly believe that he possesses the energy to live, so when she is met with the intense, feverish gleam in his rippling eyes, she falls silent in mute shock—she can practically feel the weird power pulsing beneath his paper-thin skin. "No, Konan. I'll preserve the… _his _body."

"Nagato…"

"_Please."_

There's a quiet sort of desperation in Nagato's voice, the dread of the one who is clinging to some last, tattered hope that he will not name for fear of losing it. Konan squeezes her eyes shut, and looks away.

"…_If I could bring him back…" Nagato whispers in the mud and muck. Konan, doubled over and howling, barely hears._

His hands shake, the bones painfully visible beneath skin that's pulled over them like sheer white silk. A scroll has been lying beside him, and he opens it. Konan looks back towards Nagato just in time to see him use those hands to form seals—even in his state, he can do that, when she can not—and for Yahiko's body to disappear within the scroll, like water seeping into a drain.

Konan does not know where he learned the jutsu. But then, she doesn't know where he learned to summon, either.

There are a lot of things, Konan's discovered, that she does not know.

-0-0-0-

Konan hasn't cried since Yahiko died. There's just too much for her to do.

Nagato is insisting that this is not the end for the Akatsuki, but that it is the end for peace. He lies in his bedroll and stares up at the ceiling, hoarsely whispering that Yahiko's death will not be in vain, and will not be left un-avenged. It's all he can talk about these days. Justice. Vengeance. Pain.

_What can we do? _Konan wonders bitterly to herself, as she walks in the rain and the mud that sucks relentlessly at her boots, back towards the hovel where a broken man waits for her to bring him food. All she was able to get today was half a loaf of bread. Water can be easily enough obtained in this environment, but it's not enough. _We are an organization of two, based out of a shack with a leaking roof and straw on the ground. What can we do? _

(In moments like this, Konan is almost glad that Nagato was caught in Hanzo's trap, and his legs ruined. She hates herself for it afterwards, but she knows that if he could still walk, he would have died already.)

Of course, if Yahiko were still here, they wouldn't be camping out in a shack with a leaking roof and straw on the ground. Nagato wouldn't be staring up at the ceiling and whispering of justice, vengeance and pain. They'd be forming their next course of action, planning their next move.

Yahiko never let any setback bring him down. If he were still alive, he'd summon that devil-may-care grin of his as he told the gang not to be discouraged, and Konan and Nagato would smile back, along with everyone else.

If only.

Konan stops dead in her tracks, hugging herself, the half-loaf of bread all but crushed to her chest. The rain pounds on her back, but she barely feels it.

She misses everything about Yahiko, misses his touch, his smile, the way he would lean into her when they settled down to sleep for the night, and his coarse hair would tickle her neck. She misses the way he looked at her when they were alone. She misses the hope he brought to her, the vision of a life away from war and devastation, away from hunger and grief.

For now, there is no hope at all left for her in this waterlogged wasteland of a country.

Konan straightens, and heads on, where a broken man waits for a meager quarter-loaf of bread to sustain him for another day, until she can go out and beg for some more. Her eyes are dull with hunger and grief.

-0-0-0-

Konan has not cried since Yahiko died. The whole country cries for her, after all, and her eyes are done with weeping; they are dry and dim. She needs to take care of Nagato, until the day when he inevitably dies, his newfound infirmity overwhelming him. (No longer can Konan deny that eventually, she will be left alone. But for now, the numbness that's crept upon her heart can not be dispelled even by that.)

Her life has become the small, dim, constricted world that it was before she met Yahiko and Nagato: she begs for her bread in the garb of an Ame peasant, bearing the brunt of her countrymen's scorn and biting down on the bitterness in her throat. Nagato whispers of vengeance and pain, but Konan can see no way out of this. She can no longer see any life but this.

Then, one day, Konan comes home, and finds out why Nagato wouldn't let her bury Yahiko's body.

The bowl of soup she'd obtained drops to the floor with a crash and a shatter, her blue-gray eyes open wide in shock and horror, her mouth fixed open in a soundless scream.

_Y-Yahiko…_

Yahiko stands before her, tall, straight and black-clad, as if risen from the dead. For a moment, a terrible, horrible moment, Konan can believe that Yahiko has actually come back from the dead. That he's alive again. She is flooded with a sudden warmth that, in the cold, rainy autumn after the end of everything, she'd never believed she could have back again. "Yahiko…"

But then, Konan sees the rods sticking out of his ears and lips where they never were before, sees rippling eyes where brilliant blue ones should be. "Konan."

And she hears Yahiko's body, speaking with Nagato's voice.

"What did you do?" she demands of Nagato, who still lies on his bedroll, but now looks at her, his sunken eyes feverishly bright, deep red color in his hollow cheeks. "Nagato, what did you do?"

"I had to—"

"He is dead!" Her voice trembles and cracks. He spoke out of Yahiko's mouth again. "Yahiko is dead! Let him rest, Nagato! Let him rest!"

"There is no Nagato." It is Nagato's eyes that fix on Konan, in the dim mid-afternoon, but it is still out of Yahiko's mouth that his voice comes. Yahiko's new ripple-eyes stare blankly at the opposite wall, straight over her head. "There is no Yahiko. There is only Pein. It is necessary. My body is broken, and he was our leader. Like this, we can fight again."

Konan falls back against the wall, her hands over her mouth as she quakes. The world trembles out of focus, quivering through a translucent screen of water, hazy and indistinct. The water inside her mouth tastes of salt, now, and hoarse, thick sobs build up in her chest, barely restrained. It's unnatural. It's completely unnatural. She feels as though if she tries to speak, she'll scream, and keep screaming until her lungs run out of air.

She sees Yahiko, but he looks at her with the wrong eyes. He speaks with the wrong voice.

Konan is dimly aware of arms wrapping around her torso and trying to pull her close, dimly aware of the softness of a cotton cloak pressing against her damp cheeks. But where there should be warmth, there is only cold—the chill of a corpse—and his arms are clumsy, stiff and slow, wrapping around her back but unable to bend properly. They're like the arms of a cold porcelain doll. This does nothing to soothe her; the urge to howl finally becomes too much, and the sound that rips from her throat is the guttural cry of some pre-human impulse surfacing from behind eons of civilization. She feels as though she will never stop screaming, somewhere deep inside.

In no part of her mind can Konan understand why Nagato would do this, or how he even knew to do this. But then, she doesn't think she knows Nagato at all anymore.


End file.
